“The dear old songs, the good old songs, have stood by me for so long,” sang the fiery 74-year-old Hazel Dickens in a distinctive West Virginia twang Saturday night. It was the first of four shows over the weekend pairing Ms. Dickens with the Oldham brothers — led by indie icon Will Oldham, aka Bonnie “Prince” Billy — at Joe’s Pub in celebration of “the good old songs.”

Ms. Dickens is a beloved but too-little-known singer and songwriter, one of the last to have a direct connection to American roots music. The most visible moment in her long career was the inclusion of four of her songs in Barbara Koppel’s Academy Award-winning documentary of an Eastern Kentucky coal miners’ strike, “Harlan County, USA.” But Ms. Dickens may now finally be getting her due. Later this year, a tribute album featuring covers of her songs by Alison Krause, Linda Ronstadt, Mary Chapin Carpenter, and others is set for release.

Saturday was the first time Ms. Dickens has performed since suffering two strokes in February. She sounded great — despite a persistent frog in her throat — and came out singing (literally, as she shadowboxed with the leader of her excellent bluegrassy band).

Ms. Dickens has the flat, shrill voice, sometimes too loud in so small a room, that you associate with pioneer wives and hear in the sturdy women of the “Anthology of American Folk Music.” When she sang Saturday of “being a plain old country girl raised on gospel sounds,” I couldn’t help but think of Faith Hill’s bid for Red State authenticity, “Mississippi Girl.” The difference is, with Ms. Dickens, it rings true.

Born in West Virginia coal country, she witnessed firsthand the soul-deadening and mortal (her eldest brother died of black lung) effects of poverty. She worked a series of dead-end jobs — textile mills, a tin can factory, an electric iron plant — before becoming a professional singer. In the 1960s and 1970s, having relocated to Baltimore, Ms. Dickens became an outspoken protest singer. Unlike her contemporaries in the urban folk movement, hers was a personal anger. She wasn’t singing about the Vietnam War or civil rights, but about America’s forgotten white poor, who “fell through the cracks, looking for the tracks of the American dream.”

Saturday’s first set included several protest songs, including “Cotton Fields,” about migrant workers, and the blunt-but-effective “America’s Poor,” in which she castigated companies who exploit American labor, then migrate south of the border to do it again.”Working Girl Blues”was a less strident but no less effective instrument of class warfare that found Ms. Dickens yodeling between lines about having her “pockets picked clean so the rich can have that All-American dream.”

But her show wasn’t as grimly serious as these lyrics make it sound — far from it. Ms. Dickens has a lively, sassy personality and a repertoire of broken-hearted love songs to match. She’s only written “one positive love song,” she explained. Tellingly, it isn’t even about her. Perhaps as a result, she infused the words of the achingly lovely “My Heart’s Own Love” with longing rather than the contentment they seem to imply: “Bless your heart you are my darlin’/bless your soul, you are the one,” she sang, “bless the fate that brought you to me/At last I’ve found my heart’s own love.”

The Oldham brothers, sitting three in a row with acoustic guitars and matching white chinos, opened the show with a set of well-selected covers.Their three voices crisscrossed and harmonized on numbers like “Tell Old Bill,” a chronology-blurring traditional song about the death of the title character. Will’s voice was nuanced and haunted, rising above the others to punctuate certain phrases; Ned’s was full of creaking country flourishes.The two seemed to treat the show as a learning opportunity for young Paul, the baby of the group and the least experienced performer. He sounded flat and shy as his brothers pushed him out of the nest on a few solo verses.

Their material ranged far and wide. There was “Lord of the Manor,” popularized by the Everly Brothers, about a lord who takes his maid for a lover. It’s sung from the perspective of the maid’s helpless husband, who’s left to “tend the flowers of the seeds he’s laid.”They sang playfully of ramblin’ eyes and rovin’ hearts on the charming Woody Guthrie and Jack Elliot song “More Pretty Girls Than One,” then ended the set with a wild version of original folk freak John Jacob Niles’s “The Hangman,” on which they strummed furiously and sang as weirdly as they could.

But the most poignant moment was “We Shall All Be Reunited,” a song by a Southern preacher named Alfred Karnes that was first recorded at the 1927 Bristol sessions that is said to have launched country music. Will dedicated it to “loved ones present and absent,” a reference to his recently deceased father. All three Oldhams appeared lost in thought as they asked “Where is now my father standing,” and tried to take comfort in the promise of reunion “in the land beyond the sky/where there’ll be no separation/no more parting, no more sighs.”

It was an apt demonstration of the power of traditional songs, and a reminder of the deep well of emotion from which the best ones spring.